How to Get Unstuck: The Psychology of Writer’s Block

As we move
further away
from simple brainstorming, simple tips and tricks for battling block may
become
less effective, but we come closer to understanding the root causes of
writer's
block. Mechanized thought is of the moment, whereas functional fixedness
speaks
to a writer's personal style. The big contributor in the realm of
personal
creative style is British psychologist Michael Kirton, whose Kirton
Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI)
instrument is the standard for helping people figure out what kind of
creative
thinkers they are. Kirton's model is based on the theory that everything
that
human beings do is a form of problem solving, and that everything
involves
creativity. The question is one of approach.

Phil Samuel, a
business
consultant who has a PhD in mechanical engineering and in a previous
life
worked in R&D in
the aerospace industry, is certified to give
the KAI assessment, a thirty-three-part
assessment that
poses questions such as whether or not you're good at detail work,
whether
you're ever stuck for ideas, if you like to conform in a group setting,
and if
it's hard for you to get out of bed in the morning. This inventory is
designed
to ferret out adaptive versus innovative styles, which Samuel
characterizes on
a spectrum between Edison and Einstein.

"Edison is adaptive in style," says Samuel. "The
more
adaptive look at a problem within given limits. Their creativity comes
from
doing things better and more efficiently. They care about details.
Thomas
Edison took other people's ideas and meticulously performed experiment
after
experiment. He was creative in perfecting existing ideas. Contrast that
with
the innovative style of Einstein. He questioned the problems themselves.
He may
not have been good at the details, but he looked at the prevailing view
of
Newtonian physics and decided to come up with something different."

When Samuel
consults with
businesses, he will administer the KAI
and then sort people into groups by type. He'll then give them a problem
(you're a tea bag company and Starbucks is eating your profits) and ask
the
teams to solve the problem. The difference between adaptive thinkers and
innovative thinkers is stark. "The more adaptive will want to improve
the tea
bags or do better marketing," Samuel says. "The innovative thinkers want
to
fill the tea bags with dry soup and sell it to airlines. They joke about
attacking Colombia to influence the politics of coffee." Each approach
has its
pros and cons. Innovative thinkers come up with a higher volume of ideas
and
tolerate failure better, but they can also abandon good ideas too
quickly.
Adaptive thinkers have fewer, more conservative ideas, but they
expect—and
more often achieve—high success rates.

Samuel stresses that everybody is both innovative
and
adaptive, even if you have a "preferred style." Furthermore, if you're
motivated enough, you can work in another style (Kirton calls it
"coping"),
although it might take you more time and burn more energy. The next time
you're
blocked, consider whether you might be forcing your preferred style on a
task
that requires a different approach. When I was first starting out, I
used to think
every transition had to be a work of art. The day I became a real writer
was
the day I just wrote, "Two weeks later..." and got on with it. Clifford
the Big
Red Dog is already a freakishly large dog. He doesn't need to be
vermilion.

The adaptive-innovative spectrum gets more
problematic at the
project level. A dreamer who needs to get his facts straight and a
meticulous
thinker who needs to get her ya-yas out can work through a given moment
using
the other approach. But the innovator who tries to write an English Cozy
because she thinks mysteries sell is setting herself up for misery, as
is the
adaptive writer who feels pressure to be experimental when he would be
better
off writing something more conventional. Saul Bellow said, "A writer is a
reader moved to emulation." But we have to be careful. What we like to
read may
not be what we're meant to write.

“We revere and mythologize our great authors, and we present the road to becoming a writer as a long, lonely journey of increasing knowledge and mastery, but what nobody tells you is that you already have all the tools you need.”